With Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the final film in the recent trilogy, set for release later this year, the end is nigh for the iconic series that has spanned more than 40 years of storytelling.

J.J. Abrams, who produced the trilogy that began with 2015’s The Force Awakens and was followed by 2017’s The Last Jedi, believes the final peg will serve as a conclusion to this and George Lucas’s two trilogies that came before it.

Abrams, who co-wrote and directed this final instalment, certainly felt the pressure.

“Endings are the thing that scare me the most,” he said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “This is about bringing this thing to a close in a way that is emotional and meaningful and also satisfying in terms of actually answering (as many) questions as possible. So, if years from now, someone’s watching these movies, all nine of them, they’re watching a story that is as cohesive as possible.”

Related

“While there were many things that were planned for and discussed — George Lucas himself said when he created this he saw it as three, three-act plays — that doesn’t mean there isn’t discovery, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that come up that make you realize, ‘Oh, here’s an opportunity,’” added Abrams, who wrote the film with Chris Terrio. “It also doesn’t mean that there’s a list of payoffs that we have to do because of set-ups. But we also were very much aware this is the end of the trilogy and it needs to satisfy. We went into this thing knowing it has to be an ending. We’re not screwing around.”

The Rise of Skywalker, which will include the return of Lando Calrissian, Leia Organa (using old, unseen footage of the late Carrie Fisher from Force Awakens) and Emperor Palpatine and a couple of new characters, is out Dec. 20.